Deborah's Secret

By Marcus Clauss

A few days before her final qualification lecture, Deborah gathers a group of friends to support her during the last days of her current university contract. They all know she is a fervent paleontologist. What some of them do not know is that she has a five-year-old daughter. But that is not her secret, nor how that child was conceived. It is also not her brilliance that stirs up the envy of her faculty to the point where they try to shoot her down. It is an answer she will get in that week, to a vision nobody knows about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcus Clauss
• Release date: Apr 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311299574

Marcus Clauss

Marcus Clauss, born 1970 in Germany, lives in Switzerland as a life scientist.

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Deborah's secret

Marcus Clauss

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Marcus Clauss

*****

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This is a work of fiction.

*****

I saw her step out in front of her house with bare feet on the asphalt, squinting her eyes in the sun and gazing down the road, just standing there, waiting, for her scheduled five minutes of doing nothing. I knew how cool the street felt to her feet, with the ring on her second left toe barely clacking at every other step, and how the morning air would crawl up her trouser legs, up the arms of her t-shirt. If she would do it for me, I thought, just once. Nothing, for five minutes. I would not ask for more.

It was a short time we all spent at Deborah's place that summer. All of us crammed together in her little rented house, with far less rooms than persons. People lying on the floor of every room, sleeping bags always entangled in somebody's feet in the morning. Adolescent moods with men and women sharing the single bathroom, shedding attire as the days grew hotter, and more singles of both sexes than couples. It could have been just Deborah, Sarah, Peter and me, the three of them sharing their fossil fantasies and me looking after Helen, Deborah's daughter. It would have been harmony, as it always is when we are together. But that was not what Deborah had in mind. She brought in not only her real friends, but some other friends, too, some who even did not know she had a daughter. Amongst those latter was the sire of her child. Helen was five years old by then.

She planned it like a bank robbery in one of those caper movies, where half the story time is spent on characterizing the individual team players – the infallible arrogant shooter, the high-strung explosives expert, the bold escape driver, the sinister disguise specialist, the freakish computer nerd who blocks the alarm system. All brought together by the cunning organizer who in the end pursues an aim totally different from the actual robbery. And like in those movies, it was not clear whether we all were really needed for the job, or had just been called in for her to play around with.

We did not rob a bank. Deborah is a scientist, and at the time she was in the process of passing through the last stages of her ultimate university qualification. I say scientist, as if in a job description, but Peter would call her a scientist as if describing a lifestyle. Our task was to help Deborah get through these two weeks, in which we thought she had to revise two major papers, and prepare and give her final qualification lecture. Hardly a workload she was not used to, but she envisioned a kind of quality that was exceptional, with carefully woven double and triple security nets. She expected animosities of an extent we thought ridiculous at first, and we tried not to get caught up in what we considered her personal paranoia.

But as the poet says, the fact that you are paranoid does not mean you are not in danger. When the odds are against you because someone is manipulating these odds, the question may not be whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

I think I excel in a lot of things, Daniel, Deborah said. A lot of times I think it is my paranoia that makes me truly exceptional, and my major characteristic. Describe me in just one sentence and I become a person so tuned to the atrocities others are plotting against me you could use me as a sociopath seismograph. I have always tried to be good at anything I do, and with respect to my paranoia, I have perfected it to the point you could call it foresight.

I have my own kind of foresight, I thought, and you'd call it day-dreaming. I get lost in things I would like to happen, and somewhere these dreams and the next days meet. I enjoy that, but I would have preferred to think of that on my own, not as a reaction to Deborah's statement.

What are you paranoid about, she asked to make some conversation while stirring the honey in her tea. A life without you, I answered. Her hand faltered just ever so briefly, and when it resumed the stirring and she looked at me, she caught me observing it. You made me jump just a little bit there, she said. Didn't spill anything, though, I replied. She tasted her tea, leaning on her arms and holding her cup in both hands. Never did, she said. My stomach fluttered, just a little bit, imagining she would share her cup with me. She did not say another word but handed me the cup without lifting her elbows from the table.

Foresight, I would think later with astonishment, how can she understand the ugly minds of those you would have to call the gatekeepers to her final qualification with such precision? What kind of screwed-up cunning do you need, to be able to predict such sordid plans? But even worse, why would you care to defend yourself against such assholes and impress them in the first place?

Be mild, she said. It is not the cool guys you hate losing against, it's the assholes.

That's partially true, I replied. There's no harm in losing. But as far as assholes go, as soon as you care about them, one way or the other, it's them who win. The only way for you to win against them is not to give a damn.

Deborah just looked at Daniel when he said this and knew he was right.

There you go, she said, you are right. But I don't want to win against them on a moral level. What I want is them to feel like they've lost, because they can't put me down, and because I am better than they are.

If that's the game, I am sure they won't put you down, and you're easily better, but they will draw you down with them into where their crippled minds' games matter.

And it was the only time she ever asked him to love her: Please don't stop loving me because I am down where these things matter. You know why you're here, Daniel?

I do the dishes, I replied.

You're here because I need someone who loves me no matter what happens.

Sarah and Peter could do the job as well, you know, I said.

You don't know yet what will happen here, she said. Maybe I won't need you if I am lucky. But if I am not I need you be around.

Well, Daniel said, you know I'd rather not have you need me be around.

They both sat in silence for a while. And then he added, I'd just rather have you want me be around.

There could be both, she said. In theory.

This is who we were: Deborah's team. Thinking back, I believe we were brilliant. Thinking about what we did, it feels hard to imagine that we would ever be any better. Which would make it some good old glory days to cherish and get nostalgic about, if it were not for yesterday and tomorrow. The point is, with Deborah, you'd only have to stay aboard to stay in the glory. And with about just the same ease, you could step off the wagon, to watch her from a distance, and get a feel how ordinary and laborious her life was. Now, years later, Deborah is at her desk, Sarah and Peter's car has just stopped outside, Helen and me just talked for ten minutes on the phone, and we are still aboard.

The way I see the world is, I think about gifts people have. This is hers. Glory, a glory you can share if you just stay with her. Where other people do their jobs, she does it with a vengeance, with a vehemence, with a passion, and it is up to you to despise her or pity her or adore her for it. But if you let her draw you in, you don't just observe her score, you score together with her. Even the water-bearer will feel good about going to the game on Saturday night with his team when he knows the star forward is in top form, and thanks him every time he gets a bottle from him. Is it the thanking, or is it the top form, that is more important? I do not know. I was never asked to choose.

This is who we were. Deborah, the leader, risen star in vertebrate paleontology, on the verge of her final qualification, on the last three weeks of a temporary university contract and – so some thought – fighting tooth and claw for her breakthrough; Helen, her child. Both in Deborah's bedroom, sharing her bed.

The paleontology support team of Sarah and Peter, Deborah's long-time friends, splitting the curator position at some unknown museum between them, without serious recognition in the field, maybe due to a crude case of underestimation. They had been aboard Deborah's ship for longer than anyone else. They specialized in basically anything Deborah did, testing her ideas and modifying them or giving her some, Peter with the slow thoroughness of a farmer ploughing his fields into long, straight rows, and Sarah with the apparently unpredictable jumpiness of a hare in flight, jerking from one row to some completely different ones, to and fro, and only with real patience and a keen observing eye would you realize that when she was done cavorting, she would have covered the whole field as well. Actually, it was Peter himself who gave that description, with the infallible self-irony he never hid. And when he gave it, and you looked at Sarah's face, you could not keep yourself from thinking that she thought of it as a description of their lovemaking as well. As far as Deborah goes, he would say, she works in the same way as we do – just in one person, and faster. There was no envy in his voice, no self-pity, and only a minute sideways movement of his head, a tiny tightening of his lips, and the trace of a smile on Sarah's face betrayed what they thought of her always, if they did – amazement. Sarah and Peter were the only long-term couple of the group, and felt easy enough to accept the living room sofa, because they knew they would not get much sleep anyhow. And, if you knew them really well, you could tell that they would have made their own private event of making enough love in advance to get through a time of bedding in a public place. Their task was to get all the right ideas and data ready that were still needed for Deborah's presentation.

The other paleontological support was going to be Jean-Paul, paleo-hotshot, publishing top papers only, attracting major grants and series of female students to his two major excavation sites he had been managing for several years now, and Helen's father; supposed to stay in the guest room upstairs designated for males. He generally switched between two modes, either arrogant self-assured supremacy, or an insulted air of being wronged, and the former mostly made you want to hurt him to push him into the latter. But as Deborah told me, if you concentrated on disregarding his egocentric behaviour and focused on his ideas instead, plus suppress the envy and resentment, you could not miss his ingenuity. I am a genius, he once told me in those ten days, and it was not in self-irony. I am the fastest thinker in the business. Which evidently set the stakes for me, who always thought that Deborah was just that. She never challenged him on this part. It was this ingenuity she wanted, to predict every possible attack